Technologies such as virtualization and the cloud have changed data centers dramatically in recent years. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the need to keep them cool. While many organizations have moved data and workloads to the cloud, most keep some servers on-premises, often in smaller data centers or server closets. Because most physical…

It was my honor to again attend the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Technology Conference — an annual exposition and education event formerly known as Law Enforcement Information Management (LEIM) — along with my colleagues in CDW’s government and public safety practice. The conference always affords us a great opportunity to meet with…

Many smart organizations have moved their documents to the cloud, and over the next few years, still more will join them. A cloud solution enables you to access files from any device at any time. No more shuffling files back and forth, hoping you have the latest version, or making sure you’ve copied all the…

Major hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure provide a high number of nines percentage (e.g., 99.99999 percent) of application uptime per year. However, as they are complex systems, they still cannot guarantee perfection. This fact was highlighted by an outage on Feb. 28, 2017, attributable to human error, which affected multiple…

A squirrel chewing through wires outside Yahoo’s data center in 2010. A ship dropping anchor on communication lines running underwater. There are some odd, nearly impossible occurrences that have caused unplanned downtime. Yet the most common cause of data center outages remains human error. And the more public the use of the facility, the more…

I see more customers considering the adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions in their data centers this year. The primary drivers? For most of them, it’s increased efficiency, improved ease of use and reduced costs – take your pick. HCI is a game-changing solution that simplifies a data center’s infrastructure by integrating server, storage and…

“Just make it happen!”

We live in a multi-cloud world. Not only are more customers migrating workloads to the cloud than ever before, but cloud users are realizing that diversification of a cloud strategy is a stronger method of consumption than putting all workloads into a single cloud provider. Customers demand agility and flexibility, and cloud providers must adapt…

As cloud and IT-as-a-Service-based solutions continue to command mainstream adoption, we are gaining insight into what goes into an effective cloud strategy. In the past, the term cloud strategy was, at best, ambiguous. No one knew what it meant, what went into a cloud strategy or how it would fit into their organization’s strategic vision.

If you have invested in any of Microsoft’s Cloud Solutions – such as Azure, Office 365, Intune and Enterprise Mobility Suite – it is likely you’ve heard the term Digital Partner of Record or DPOR for short.